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Rather than taking a break from an arduous year of study and research, medical student Vinay Menon chose to spend his university summer vacation volunteering in outback Australia.

Mr Menon, who is aged 23 years and in his final year of medicine, went to Arnhem Land to help run a school holiday program for Indigenous children under the auspices of the Australian Red Cross.

“It is a program we run in 10 communities in the Northern Territory,” he said.

“It is to provide strong role models during the holidays, work on issues such as nutrition and give the children healthy activities to do instead of getting involved in antisocial behaviour.”

The program consisted of a lot of sport, such as barefoot football and soccer, arts and crafts, disco and movie nights.

Mr Menon was in Arnhem Land as part of his role as National Youth Representative of the Australian Red Cross, in which he represents a few thousand young volunteers across the nation.

“The aim is to improve the service delivery to young people who are disadvantaged, such as those from a refugee background,” he said.

His interest in human rights and helping others began at the age of 15, when he enlisted as a volunteer for the Starlight Children’s Foundation which helps seriously ill and hospitalised children. His passion became even stronger when, at the age of 17, he volunteered for Oxfam, World Vision, Red Cross and other charities.

At the age of 19, he co-founded a program called World Aware, which is based in Perth and run by Red Cross volunteers and staff.  They work to help refugees from various countries, including Sudan, Burma and Pakistan.

Each year the group runs a series of skill-building workshops over 6-8 weeks that focus on issues including mental health, sexual health, working with media, finding essential health and legal aid services, and understanding the Australian culture – such as interpreting what “bring a plate” actually means. The workshops may include dance, drama, arts and cultural pursuits.

His human rights work did not stop there and for his elective placement in his medical degree, Mr Menon worked in a hospital in Tanzania after which he spent several weeks as a volunteer with the Tanzanian Red Cross working in a refugee camp on the border of Tanzania, Burundi and the Congo. The refugee camp had three doctors for 49,000 people.

His voluntary advocacy work with refugees, Indigenous communities and children living with a disability earned him the high accolade of being awarded The Young People’s Human Rights Medal for 2009, which is sponsored by the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Australian Government’s Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

In a related move, Mr Menon took a year out last year to complete a Bachelor of Medical Science degree, having won the Neville Stanley BMedSc scholarship that is funded by a donation from John and Rosemary Pearman.

The reason he chose to do the BMedSc degree was that he “was not ready to enter the real world,” he said with a chuckle.

The real reason was that he wanted to get a feel for research. “The more I study medicine, the more I realise there is a lot of big picture stuff I really want to understand in terms of public health, and research is very important for that,” he said.

He worked for the year with the Vaccine Trials Group based at the School of Paediatrics and Child Health at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children and the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research. Mr Menon said he enjoyed his year with the group and would continue to be involved this year.